161–170 of 271 posts
One more factor in Wordle's popularity that I haven't yet seen commentators identify much. The game's word roster tilts heavily toward words with neutral or cheerful connotations. So your brain conjures up something happy at the end. You don't slog through the puzzle solving to end up with VIRUS, ENNUI, GRIEF, SLAVE, INANE or other such morose words. Instead, we get the likes of AWAKE, BLUSH, FOCAL, etc. That helps m…
The code design is also very elegant in its simplicity. You have two static lists of words in the JS code - known words, and a smaller, random pre-shuffled list of words the game will select from. The selection is done on the client, by date, from the second list - every day at midnight (your local time!) the next word in the pre-shuffled list is selected - no hashing or randomizing or anything. No cookies are involv…
It's letting go of notions of what makes good code. I had a Moment like that doing Pico-8, since you can only fit 40 or so characters on screen, all the tutorials just use dirty, single or two letter variable names, and since everything is small and you learn a few neat tricks about variables (velocity, coordinates, the mod operator), the code can be really compact... and filthy. It's great.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The wordlist definitely isn't perfect, and obviously each person has their own vocabulary, but it still is a key. It's something the creator mentions, if on your first play you run into a stupid word, you probably won't come back the next day. And the fact that the current word list is 1/th the total word count goes to show how many words are ridiculous. AFAIK his partner actually sifted through all 13k word list and…
That's interesting, I suspect a lot of Wordle's success derives from their curation of words to remove things like "abaft" and "imago". But then I see the NYT went and removed words like "caulk" and "agora" because they were "obscure", and I feel better about humph.
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When I first discovered Wordle, I immediately looked for a way to keep playing with new random words, something that most clones have implemented. After a few rounds, it just wasn't as fun. What makes it fun to spend 10 minutes on the game is that it's the only round of the day so there's a pay-off to giving it some thought. When you can keep playing new rounds, it's just not rewarding and I would just close the tab…
This mechanic you describe is actually quite common in freemium games. Games like Farmville don’t let you burn yourself out and purposely make you wait and come back hours or days later to get that dope rush.
They don't do it to avoid burnout, they do it as a payment gate-keeper: you have to pay to progress in any meaningful way.
The game's word-size of 5 limits binging. I went back to play some of the first few words and found that I got sick of the game very quickly.
It'd be interesting to hear the creator of Wordle explain their decisions.
I may be completely wrong but, after playing 3 or 4 times, I got the feeling that this game is very easy and involves more luck than skill or strategy. It looks and feels like a puzzle so you get the feeling of having solved something but have you, really? If you find the word in 3 tries 90% of the time, does it mean you're actually better at the game than someone who usually needs 4 or 5 attempts? Or are you just a…
For example the choice of your first word matters a lot, should you plane something like ADIEU to get most of the vowels, or should you plane something like CRANE that has a lot of the popular consonants?
And then the biggest mistake I see people make is getting a lot of the letters in the right spot early and then just leaving them there on subsequent guesses. Instead you should be thinking about what types of words can be made with the letters you know about and then what types of whole new words that don't contain any of the letters that you know are correct will give you the most information about the letters you don't know... ideally your first few guesses should contain none of the same letters in order to to maximize the information you gain from each guess.
I may be completely wrong but, after playing 3 or 4 times, I got the feeling that this game is very easy and involves more luck than skill or strategy. It looks and feels like a puzzle so you get the feeling of having solved something but have you, really? If you find the word in 3 tries 90% of the time, does it mean you're actually better at the game than someone who usually needs 4 or 5 attempts? Or are you just a…
Effectively there are 2 wordles at the moment - the my times link has a different word and I was using the old uk link and so my partner and I are having different words. Pretty funny/an opportunity to do the ‘crossword’ twice a day! (For however long they keep it up!)
It (the old version at least), is pure client-side... just download a copy and never worry about it going away.
The code design is also very elegant in its simplicity. You have two static lists of words in the JS code - known words, and a smaller, random pre-shuffled list of words the game will select from. The selection is done on the client, by date, from the second list - every day at midnight (your local time!) the next word in the pre-shuffled list is selected - no hashing or randomizing or anything. No cookies are involv…
> This is so counter to how we usually design software in so many ways, it's just delightful. It's letting go of notions of what makes good code. I had a Moment like that doing Pico-8, since you can only fit 40 or so characters on screen, all the tutorials just use dirty, single or two letter variable names, and since everything is small and you learn a few neat tricks about variables (velocity, coordinates, the mod…